| Summary: | In Swedish primary school, the subjects geography, history, social studies or citizenship education and religion are integrated and known as one school subject called civic orientation. Through history, the civic orientation is characterized as a subject with a strong role to bring up a specific form of citizen. In civic orientation, there is mandatory content which the teacher must relate to. The mandatory content is based on certain views of children’s abilities and needs and thus sets the framework which either enables or limits the children. But the teacher also has the freedom to add content based on his/her own personal view of children’s needs and interests, and at the same time the curriculum also leaves room for interpretations. The purpose of this study is to analyze how the child in primary school is described, or what representations of the child are dominating in the civic orientation curricula. Furthermore, the aim of this study is to compare these representations to what three different teachers express when they motivate their didactic choices in civic orientation. The purpose of the comparison is to see whether the teachers are maintaining or questioning these representations of the child when they relate to the content expressed in the civic orientation curricula. The result shows that the content of the curricula is based on ideas that the child is socially and cognitively immature and therefore in need of simplification and protection. The teachers contribute to both questioning and maintaining these ideas, but their statements also reflect structural conditions of the school.
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